Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Indigenous rights movement birthed in blood and instrumental inco-
herence as well as the best of intentions.
It is perhaps not surprising that these foundational efforts to con-
ceptualize Indigenous rights insisted on a tripartite scheme. They dis-
tinguished populations descended from ancient empires in the Andes
and Mesoamerica from “aboriginal forest-dwellers” or primitives. They
also proposed a third group: “marginals,” or those “who find themselves
placed halfway between two strongly different cultural
milieux
and whose
main characteristic lies in an incomplete adhesion and participation both
in the national and the aboriginal milieus.”
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That is, the most degraded
Indians were not those with undeveloped cultures but those believed to
have no culture at all. What is distinct about the contemporary moment
is that the sociolegal logics of cultural diversity invert assimilationist
schema while intensifying the violent marginalization of ex-primitives.
Through the logics of culture, the terrifying murk of a colonial death
space premised on consuming Indian flesh and souls is both disavowed
and extended.
The marginal living conditions of Ayoreo-speaking people, of course,
were not new either. Much like the disordered subjectivities of Ayoreo-
speaking people, they reflected long histories of slavery, genocide, dis-
possession, and displacement. Yet recent realignments of governance,
market, and citizenship amplified these preexisting inequalities to the
point whereby those excluded from the matrix of culture were no longer
deemed worthy of the same kind of life, if they were worthy of any life
at all.
Disintegration and death defined the lives of supposedly deculturated
ex-primitives—a process equally obvious in urban peripheries and former
wilderness zones, now bulldozed, where state authority has long been
precarious and arbitrary. This occurred against a backdrop of familiar
and well-documented trends typical of late or neoliberalism, includ-
ing increasing disparities in wealth and health between Ayoreo people
and their non-Indigenous counterparts, the loss of viable ancestral ter-
ritories to rampant agro-industrial expansion, internal social fragmenta-
tion, diminishing sources and opportunities for wage labor, a general
disconnection of Ayoreo from macroeconomic trends, and social stig-
matization. What was new at the time was how these trends were at
once amplified, naturalized, and disguised through state guarantees of
cultural rights. That is, the political governance of culture redistributed
and fundamentally changed the nature of Indigenous marginality. This
occurred through new linkages being made between authorized culture
and legitimate Indigenous life.
